Deadly Beloved(15)

The George-V had a lobby that looked like a stage set for a movie about France during the time of Marie Antoinette. The carpet was so plush, Karla felt as if she were swimming in it. The chandeliers were so large and densely packed with crystals, they sounded like factories full of glassware breaking every time there was a slight breeze. Karla saw a woman in a chinchilla coat down to her ankles and another woman walking five overgroomed dogs on silver lamé leashes. Karla could feel the dust in her pores, caked and hardening. Her hair felt so dirty, she wanted to cut it off instead of get it washed.

The man behind the registration desk was beaming and bouncing in her direction. He came around the counter to where she was standing and took her hand, talking all the time in a rapid-fire French Karla hadn’t a hope in hell of understanding. Karla wouldn’t have understood if he’d spoken in slow French. She had never paid much attention to her language classes.

Karla let the man take her hand and bow while she smiled back. Then she turned to Evan at her side and raised her eyebrows. Evan was her new assistant, hired less than ten months ago in a fit of craving for organization. This time, Karla had told herself, she was not going to go off for a year in the hinterlands and let her life unravel in the process. She was going to have somebody who would keep track of the bills and the receipts and the travel arrangements and let her keep her mind on her photography. She had put an ad in the Vassar College alumnae magazine, expecting to get a young woman with an itch for travel—and ended up with Evan instead. Vassar was coed these days. It kept slipping Karla’s mind.

Evan was tall and thin and wore wire-rimmed glasses, the way all the preppie boys did these days. He was also very smart and very eager and close to fluent in French.

“Evan,” Karla whispered, leaning back so that he could hear her. “What is going on here?”

Evan rubbed his soft hands together and blinked. “Monsieur Gaudet is welcoming the famous Karla Parrish to Paris.”

“The famous Karla Parrish?”

Evan reached into his shoulder bag and pulled out a magazine. His shoulder bag was an expensive piece from Mark Cross, given to him by his mother when he got this job with Karla. Evan’s mother was an oncologist in Grosse Pointe.

The magazine Evan handed to Karla was a copy of Paris-Match. The cover photo was a black-and-white of a refugee camp in Zaire. Karla checked it out critically and decided that she had blurred the print a little in the bottom left-hand corner. She hated developing on the road. She never got the effects she wanted unless she had days to work at them.

“They put my photograph on the cover,” she said. “That’s good.”

“Page twelve,” Evan said.

Karla opened to page twelve. There was a photograph of her there—a terrible photograph, she thought, taken at the worst possible moment in an airport somewhere, with her hair coming out of its pins and her eyes drooping. She looked down the column of print and found her name in bold-faced type halfway to the bottom of the page. This seemed to be some kind of gossip column. She handed the magazine back to Evan.

“I don’t get it,” she said.

Evan put the magazine back in his shoulder bag. “You could be bigger than Annie Liebowitz,” he said solemnly, “if you paid a little more attention to your image.”

“I don’t think Annie Liebowitz pays attention to her image.”

“Annie Liebowitz lived with the Rolling Stones for a year. You live with refugees in central Africa. It’s a different situation.”

“It’s my situation.”

The man from behind the desk had summoned a bellhop. The bellhop took Karla’s backpack out of her hands with all the seriousness he would have brought to the luggage of the Pope. Karla felt like an idiot.

“It’s a question of knowing what to do and where to do it,” Evan said judiciously. “I got you in every gossip column in France practically, and I set up an interview with a man from People magazine. He’ll be here the day after tomorrow. And after that you’re going back to the United States for a month.”

“Am I really? Evan, for Christ’s sake. You can’t just rearrange my life that way.”

“You don’t have anything else to do for the next six weeks,” Evan pointed out. “You were the one who said you wanted to be calm for a while.”

“I was thinking of taking a vacation in the south of Spain. I always take my vacations in the south of Spain.”

“From what I can figure out looking through your records, you haven’t taken a vacation in twelve years. I got you a three-day visiting-artist thing at the University of Pennsylvania. Two lectures. Three seminars. One dinner.” Evan pawed through his shoulder bag and came up with a folded piece of paper. He handed it over to her and said, “I tried for Yale and I tried for Brown, but they’re going to have to wait. You’re going to have to let me work on your reputation for a while.”